CRM 2011 – Processes what are they?

I was doing some work in CRM 2011 and then I wanted to do a workflow.  I go to the customerization menu and I can’t find workflows.

You have to wonder why Microsoft constantly keeping not only changing the name of things but also moving them around.  You sometimes wonder if they go out of their way to make upgrading and using a new version difficult

Aha of course another tweak another complete renaming of things.

I don’t know why I didn’t realise Workflows would now be known as Process.  Then when you go in Process you can create a workflow!!  Although you can create a dialog as well.

There have been a few enhancements to workflows, you can run workflows on these entities

• Connection
• Connection Role
• Goal
• Queue Item
• Recurring Appointment
• SharePoint Site

You also get a to see Retry Count and Postponed until, which shows you how long the workflow is postponed until.

You get more error information, so instead of some mysterious error message you now get to see the full XML error message.

The final improvement I noticed is an admin screen for the workflow which has a tick box saying

“Automatically delete completed workflows to save space.

I haven’t used dialogs yet but if you want to read about that I found this article

http://ayazahmad.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/call-scripting-in-microsoft-crm-2011/

CRM 2011 – deactivating system views and filtered lookups

Whilst watching the partner source CRM 2011 training videos, I was interested to see you can deactivate systems views

you can also copy system views.

Any new feature which is extremely welcome because people used to do it programitcally in CRM 4 is filtered lookups.  You can filter lookups using any of the previous views for that entity.

you can watch a youtube video about filtered lookups here

I also found a blog post on it here

To be honest this is one of the more straight forward changes added into CRM 2011 and not one that needs much puzzling over.